"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis

Sunday, February 14, 2016

RNC Filled The Food Fight Auditorium With Rubio And Cruz Supporters

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Last night the RNC seems to have limited the audience to Rubio and Cruz fans. Herr Trumpf was thoroughly boo-ed whenever he opened his mouth. I wonder if Priebus got his ideas about who to admit to the debate audience from Wasserman Schultz. The Rubio and Cruz fans also booed each other during the immigration cat fight. Trumpf kept calling Cruz a liar... in fact, eventually, they all started calling each other liars. I can't imagine any non-Republican could have watched this silly debate without noticing none of them is fit to be president.

Did anyone think Herr Trumpf wouldn't file a birther lawsuit against Cruz? Well, to be fair, it wasn't Herr himself... just some uncoordinated supporters... as uncoordinated as Cruz's and Hillary's SuperPACs I'm sure. It was filed in Alabama February 3 and seeks a judgment "declaring that Rafael Edward Cruz is ineligible to qualify/run/seek and be elected to the Office of the President of the United States of America" due to his Canadian birth. Rubio-haters also filed a suit against Rubio's eligibility, even though he was born in the U.S. Their contention is that neither of his parents was a citizen and that he was an anchor baby and not eligible. I suppose if President Trumpf appoints Sarah Palin and Ann Coulter to the Supreme Court, that could fly some day. But not now, uh... no.

Funniest thing Trumpfian I heard all week was from Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman at the NY Times: maybe Herr's raunchy language will drive him out of the race. Have they never met his supporters? Oh, wait; they have. "His backers," they wrote, "who polls indicate include many without a college degree, see his willingness to speak coarsely as yet another refreshing example of his resistance to political correctness. His critics, many of them more affluent, view his language as a particularly vivid sign that he lacks basic decency and is ill suited to the nation’s highest office."

The Trumpf masses are now coming to his shows demanding he say "pussy." As his lead into last night's debate the most right-wing of the Times's right-wing OpEd writers, Ross Douthat, shared his innermost thoughts about Herr: Why I Can't Learn To Love Donald Trump. Mentioning the "near-total Republican disarray," he references two mainstream Democrats' opinions as to why to shun Herr Trumpf.

On the one hand, Jonathan Chait has made the case that his fellow liberals should cheer Trump on, not only because he’s unlikely to win a general election but also because it wouldn’t be so bad if he did, since he’d be a much more ideologically-unsettled figure than a President Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz, and thus more likely to cut deals with Democrats and generally govern from some kind of center. As a hopeful example, he invokes as a Trumpian forerunner Arnold Schwarzenegger, another misogynist celebrity demagogue who ended up as “a highly effective governor” because all he cared about was his popularity, which made him much more willing to work across party lines.Then for a counterpoint, there’s Ezra Klein, who concedes that we can’t know what a Trump White House would mean for public policy, but argues that liberals (and everyone else) should find him “terrifying” nonetheless, for reasons that have less to do with the specifics of what he might stand for than with how unbound he is from normal conventions and restraints.

He agrees with Ezra. "I don’t think anyone, "he wrote, "right or left, should feel sanguine about what he represents, or about the prospect of having someone so unrestrained elected to an office that’s increasingly lacking in effective formal restraints upon its powers... [A] Trumpian four years would almost certainly involve a significant degradation of the unwritten restraints on presidential conduct, an acceleration of royalist tendencies that may be built into our system but still deserve to be slowed down, and a blurring of reality-TV and political culture that takes us several leagues further along the road to President Camacho. I don’t think that the nebulous possibility of dealmaking should tempt liberals to welcome this kind of experiment; I don’t think the hope of a more working-class-friendly G.O.P. should tempt conservative reformers to learn to love it either. And the fact that recent presidents have already pushed the envelope in all kinds of troubling ways is not a “what’s the big deal” case for accepting Trumpism: Noting that George W. Bush approved waterboarding (while insisting that we don’t torture) or that Barack Obama launched wars without congressional approval (while denying they were real wars) is not a case for electing a candidate who’s gleeful in his promises to torture with abandon and rob other countries of their oil; rather, it’s a warning of what the office does to men who are restrained by norms and rules and the tribute that executive vice still has to pay to constitutional virtue."Does this make sense to anybody, anywhere? Does someone think he's saying something? Maybe you have to listen to Hate Talk Radio non-stop for a decade to imagine you know what he's talking about.